Why Washington D.C. Gossip Sucks

Write a D.C. gossip blog and looking for an easy vanilla post? Just find some unimportant interview of someone tangentially attached to someone in the political world and quote it heavily. It beats going out and, you know, talking to people and getting stories on your own.

Case in point: President Obama’s personal trainer was on CCN last week to talk about how he keeps the President in shape. Politico CLICK took a couple of Cornell McClellan’s quotes, threw in an AP picture of Obama playing basketball and called it a day. Total word count: 142, with a whopping 34 not involved in direct quotes.

But that seems like War and Peace compared to Yeas & Nays.Their post, in which they “hat tip” Politico, meaning they didn’t even bother to watch the interview themselves, is a dizzying 67 words, with only 15 words not appearing in quotation marks.

Who would have ever thought a post with only 34 original words could be out-lazied?